Shop Talk

Just as engineers seldom have the opportunity for extended evaluation and comparison of a wide range of products, we also don’t get much chance to share and test our beliefs with our fellow pros. That was one of the most rewarding parts of this session.

For me, the shop talk really got underway when we finished listening to the fourth pair of speakers, Ed Long’s MDM-4 Near-Field® Monitors (the very speakers that actually own the Near-Field® trademark!). I had used these speakers years ago, teaching for National Public Radio, and had enjoyed them at the time, but never really gotten off on them. Now, compared to other more contemporary speakers we were hearing, I thought they sounded dark, undistinguished and a little muddy. I’d finished writing down notes to the effect of “good example of just how far speaker design has come over the past decade,” when Jim McCurdy said, “These are the only speakers I can reliably mix on. My clients sometimes wonder what I’m doing at the time, but I find my MDM-4 mixes travel really well and sound great over a broad range of speakers. I’m so accustomed to them that I feel lost on an NS10 or something equally bright. I feel I can rely on them.”

This kicked off an extended discussion that went on for the remainder of the day, about how we make mix decisions. Joe Marno confided that while he enjoyed most of the speakers we were listening to, he had to make all of his basic mix decisions on a single mono Radio Shack Minimus Seven 6 inches in front of his face. “It’s the only way I really know where I am with a mix,” he confessed. (Actually, Joe admitted later that he does, er, also listen to B&W DM100s.) Joe’s theory? “If a speaker sounds too good, you stop working on your sound too soon.” Tom Bates got into the fray with a number of observations along this line: “All the speakers, except possibly the MDM-4s, are too damn bright, which may be a danger - when the monitors are this bright, we may mix dull records, especially when we’re tired, which of course is when we’ve usually gotta make our decisions. The MDM-4s are so colorless and unexciting that they force you to put all that extra excitement into the music.”

Everybody allowed as how they liked to check mixes in their cars, including one story about driving up and down the ramps in a midtown Manhattan parking garage to check out a mix. Other reality checks abounded. Everybody listens on as broad a range of speakers as they can. Bates finally expressed this concept as a rule of thumb that we might all tape to the meter bridge: “You can’t quit mixing until your mix sounds good on all of the available speakers, not just some of them.”

What It All Means

In spite of the range in our backgrounds, we found a pretty strong consensus. Two things emerged from these listening sessions: first, a kind of collective preference masquerading as wine-soaked audio truth revealed by loudspeakers, and second, a sharp and well-focused insight into the criteria we really use for monitoring while mixing.

That wine-soaked audio truth seems to shine most clearly from the ProAc Studio 100s, the Audix HRM-3s, the Paradigm Mini Mk. IIIs, the Apogee Ribbon Monitor, and the Aerial Model 5s. Other speakers seemed more troublesome, less revealing, for a broad variety of reasons, although many, probably most, of these monitors could be used for mixing with a high degree of success.

When it comes to mixing, our monitor choices are considerably different than what we would choose to listen to for fun! Production monitor choices are very much like choices of musical instrument. Why we originally chose one musical instrument brand over another is often lost in the mists of time, but what matters is that it was our choice, we’ve lived with it, adapted to it and succeeded with it. As a result, we now depend on it and would be lost without it. Changing to a “better” monitor would be silly. We’d simply be lost in the ozone once again!

So, the most critical thing is that you really get to know your monitors. You can mix on just about anything, once you’ve really sussed it out and become one with it. What you can’t do is keep switching around, always looking for something better. You must know your monitors, intimately! They are your ax!

At the same time, the ears at this the session were both experienced and pretty good. I think you can generally trust our preferences, if you haven’t already locked into other ones. We tend to be conservative, and look for speakers that will reveal, not hype, a recording. Even if we wouldn’t buy ‘em for ourselves because we’re already locked into something else, the best speakers in this group will really serve you well.

One other insight out of all of this is our sense that the philosophy of near-field monitoring – the use of narrow-dispersion speakers within a few feet of us in order to minimize the effect of room reverberance – may not be correct. We suspect that the acceptance of near-field monitors may not be due to the validity of the philosophy but rather due to the fact that the best near-field monitors are simply better speakers, at least from 100 Hz. on up, than their predecessors in the studios.

What The Future Holds

One of the side-effects of these tests has been some intense interest from various manufacturers. Several have decided to consider modifications of their products as a result of our feedback to them. Others have asked for further consideration and retesting. As a result, we expect to continue this sort of work on an ad hoc basis, evaluating both products under development and products in the market, seeking to provide useful direction and help for all of the manufacturers involved, hopefully leading to higher quality products that cost less. (What?!) We also expect to listen to microphones, various toys, and other implements of audio mayhem in the future. I’ll keep you posted.

As Tom Bates says, Happy grapes, not guns!

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